Biden also recently suggested that he owes an apology to Anita Hill for his handling, as chair of the Judiciary Committee, of her accusations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas. “Anita Hill was vilified when she came forward by a lot of my colleagues, character assassination. I wish I could’ve done more to prevent those questions and the way they asked them,” he
said on the
Today show last year. But Biden, as the
Boston Globe’s Joan Vennochi
noted, “also posed questions designed to humiliate her” during her testimony.
By failing to call favorable witnesses or solicit affidavits from experts on sexual harassment, Biden was as responsible for Hill’s “character assassination” and Thomas’s place on the Supreme Court as anyone. “He did everything to make it be good for Thomas and to slant it against her,” Georgetown University law professor Susan Deller Ross observed to the Times in 2008.